For The King is a neat boardgame-like role playing game where you move characters around the world, complete quests, fight monsters, improve your gear, conquer dungeons and level up. I was fully on board for most of the game, really enjoying the battle system, the style and the overall progression, but ultimately didn’t like the board game concept of moving slowly on a huge board over a certain period of turns by throwing movement dice around. I’m not sure if there would’ve been a way to do it differently, of course, so your milleage may vary!
Mutant Year Zero: Road To Eden is a strategy game, a bit like XCom or Fire Emblem, where you control a cast of mutated animal humanoids as they try to survive and discover the secrets of a post-apocalyptic world. With a larger focus on exploration, setting up ambushes before fights and customization of your characters via skills and equipment, I was getting ready for a grand ol’ time with it. Ultimately my adventures through MYZ:RTE were cut short by a bunch of really difficult fight that I couldn’t figure my way around, which is a darned shame.
XCOM 2 is the fantastic follow-up to the reboot of the franchise of the same name where you play a covert militaristic group trying to save the world from aliens by sending soldiers on missions, managing your resources and attempting to accomplish certain objectives under a time pressure in order to avoid a wide range of dire consequences. I had a great time playing it on the easiest difficulty with a large dose of save scumming, but regardless of if that’s the way XCOM should be played, it’s just a good time.
Space Pirates And Zombie is a space strategy game about forming factions, upgrading your ship, fighting and conquering sectors while managing a zombie threat. I remembered having fun with the first game, so I went into this one wondering how it would go. I was overall pleasantly surprised, with the move to 3D being more or less only aesthetic and the core loop of the game still being pretty fun, but I had some issues with progression, both of your ship and of the story, so I didn’t stay with it until the end.
War For The Overworld is the spiritual successor to Dungeon Keeper; a game where you manage a fantasy dungeon by summoning creatures, directing their work, building rooms and fighting enemies to - usually - destroy the core of their dungeon. I had a bit of fun at the beginning of the game, but that evaporated as I went through the campaign, and I lost interest. I wouldn’t say that WFTO is a bad game, but it’s not exactly what I wanted.
Stellaris is an amazing 4X space strategy game that has you lead a civilization of space explorers across the galaxy, colonizing planets, building them up, researching technologies, making choices and ultimately grow to be a powerhouse in some fashion. I had a terrific time with it and I could see myself playing it more or less forever like a Civilization title. I even bought some DLC for it because it opened up neat possibilities that weren’t in the base game - something I do fairly rarely.
Star Vikings Forever is a strange little game that felt like it was tiptoeing between being a puzzle game and a strategy RPG. You go through grid-based maps of enemies, traps and treasures, surmounting considerable odds by using your party’s skills and the enemies own attacks against themselves, while leveling up character, recruiting new ones and getting gear for them. I wish it had chosen what it wanted to be more definitely. As it stands, it was a bit frustrating no matter which way I would approach it.
Rebel Inc is the spiritual successor to Plague Inc, a game about infecting the whole world with a deadly virus. In this version of the strategy genre, you have to manage a region of the world in turmoil after a war and get to 100% stability in order to win. To do so, you have a wide range of upgrades you can buy and tactics to deploy, especially when insurgents decide to come into play and require you to act militarily as well. I had an okay time with this game but ultimately found it was too much of a numeric mess with so much data that I just couldn’t process it all and had to make uninformed decisions, which never feels great.
I’ve always been a huge fan of Civilization games. They’re the kind of games I just can get into for endless hours without a care in the world, without going to sleep even if I should, just clicking away at the ‘next turn’ button until my plans either come to fruition or the whole game comes crashing down on me. Of course, I’m not a -great- Civilization player, I just go for the easy-ish difficulty and try to min-max my civilizations into getting one of the various types of victories you can get. Nonetheless, I had a blast playing Civilization VI and would wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone that has even just an inkling of passion for strategy games.
TASTEE: Lethal Tactics profoundly disappointed me. From strange technical issues to an overly complicated introduction, what really did me in was the core gameplay that absolutely made no sense to me. In this strategy game, you move units around while planning your actions in order to complete missions and ‘play’ your turns at your own pace. In theory, this is really cool - and the game’s tutorial made the whole process seem really interesting with the many ways you could watch turns play out before picking the right one. In practice, the actual game uses fog of war in a very aggressive way that turns any odds of having fun into a trial-and-error slog.
I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into with Invisible Inc. On one hand, the game promised a deep tapestry of lore and intrigue set in a futuristic world ruled by corporations and filled with hackers, military drones and assassins while on the other claiming to be a roguelike where you would lose constantly, crushed by the might of the corporations before you would finally have enough characters, skills and AI programs to finally win by the skin of your teeth. I’m not sure I got either of these because my first playthrough went pretty well, didn’t take that long and I still managed to win, uploading my AI into the corporation’s server. The game kinda expected me to retry on a harder difficulty, but I was left wanting for a reason to do so; Either from a gameplay or story perspective, I felt I was done with Invisible Inc. after that run.
Into The Breach is a really neat turn-based strategy game where you control a few mechs in order to defeat an alien force across multiple continents and save people. The core concept of ITB is that you have (almost) all the information necessary to plan your turns and that there is no randomness in how things play out. There’s a ton of stuff to unlock - new teams of mechs, new pilots, achievements and what have you - and you can replay the game almost endlessly with the same basic and effective mechanics set. I really enjoyed ITB!
Chroma Squad is a neat little strategy RPG where you move your characters on a grid to fight enemies, like Fire Emblem, Disgaea or Final Fantasy Tactics. Inspired strongly by the Power Rangers, it follows a team of actors as they progress doing their own show, growing their studio and equipment from nothing to having a ton of fans, great gear and even a giant robot they can fight with. I enjoyed the core gameplay of the game although I feel that there is too much stuff on the edges that ultimately prevented me from having a great time.
Steamworld Heist is a weird strategy RPG with shooting and platforming aesthetics that I really enjoyed. You build up your team of robots and bring them on missions where you have to gather loot and defeat enemies to get stronger and advance through the story. It's really fun and the challenge level is customizable enough where you can tweak the difficulty if it's too tough for you. I really enjoyed playing it and I almost completed it because I kept wanting to see more of the skills, items and challenges it had to offer.
Fire Emblem Heroes is the second foray from Nintendo into the mobile game space, and while a free-to-play product usually interests me less than paid endeavors I had to give it a try being a big Fire Emblem fan. The end product is an interesting game that doesn't abuse its premium currency while being a fun light version of the original thing. I think that you still need a certain mindset before diving in - particularly because of the randomness of unit 'pulls' but it's still a neat strategy game.
Concrete Jungle is a weird little game where you're trying to build a city using cards from a deck that improve or worsen tiles on a grid. The goal of each level is to collect enough points on each column to advance the board forward, losing you lives if you can't figure out how to clear them. The addition of multiple characters with skill trees and card unlocks as you level up is nice, but I found the game too difficult and a bit too random to be enjoyable for me.
Sneaky Sneaky is probably not a bad game, but it's certainly not the game that I thought it would be; On the surface, this is a sneaking game where you move on a grid to try and go to the end of dungeons while avoiding enemy patrols, traps and other obstacles, collecting jewels and killing foes along the way. The core concept is quite interesting, but the execution is flawed as the game is played in real time. Whenever you get spotted by the enemy, the game switches to a turn-based mode that I wish was the whole game, really.
Valkyria Chronicles is a weird mix between a turn-based strategy game and a third person shooter set in fictional Europe during a parallel world World War. With plenty of content, neat style and somewhat deep systems, it could've been a great game for me, sadly it doesn't go over "good" since the mix of strategy and shooting created a bunch of frustrating messes that I didn't enjoy slogging through at all.
For some reason, this interesting strategy game on iOS didn't display ads properly at first, when I got it. The IAP to get rid of them was there, but I never saw any. Maybe if I had, it would've gotten a 3/5, depending on how frequent they would have been. But I still say it's an interesting game because grid-based strategy products aren't that abundant on iOS - even if the platform should suit them well - and the team building with new units you unlock after completing certain missions is a pretty good drive to keep playing.
Civilization 5 was a masterpiece of sorts and Beyond Earth iterates upon the concepts brought to Civ5, adding a few things that are quite interesting and still creating the perfect 'one more turn' experience. You have more control on the direction your civilization is taking with some more customization features that impact gameplay in semi-significant ways and you have about half a dozen ways to victory. It's one of the rare games where I just started playing and emerged from a 8 hour session, only after victory was within my grasp. This was on very easy, but oh well.